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Isaac has the grace of bruises on his knees and shoulders, patterned like little buttons of plastic sewn in to his skin. They're a map of beer and tequila stains on his shirt sleeves. They're a photo album of tested waters and notes in a journal.
But his cracking smile always felt like the wild twisting conveying mistake he would tread so lightly on. Because he loved looming in Scott's doorway with a slack jawed smirk, holding the portal open with his foot and a rouge bottle on his hip.
If was a nightly occurrence now, tripping up stairs to their apartment, offering the lip of a beer, tacking his eyes on how Scott drank.
And he hated it, swinging in like his brace of bottles and mistakes and offers were overstepping bounds beyond what he had the right to do. But they never drank enough to forget and they never drank enough to regret those obscene kisses and lustful wandering fingers.
And every night, every tipsy encounter, Isaac said that he loved Scott. First like a friend, like a brother, then so adamantly in return of what always seemed like real love in a biblical meaning.
They had wanted to adventure away when Allison died, but the length of road for two students was to the end of county lines and back before responsibility got the best of them. They stayed near home, intoxicated by the great depression left by Allison Argent and the pulled string that bound them all together.
That depression and emptiness she left was where they rested, curled up like constantly shifting puppies. And the quell of dark slumber was where they loved so sweetly, held so gently, kept so calmly.
They talked about their future in those nights before the threat of pestering violence hit them again, put their resting place in danger. And becoming so intricately sewn together with battle wounds they licked and cracked splintering bones and the lost memories of what they should have gotten the strength for, it seemed so natural a path to where they've reached. The place, an apartment all their own, littered with their memories found among fallen friends.
Isaac kept Erica's notebooks when she marked her seizures and medication from a time he would have liked to have known her. He kept Boyd's sweaters, full of his aftershave and deodorant stains and what seemed like the indents of his fingers in the sleeves.
Scott wore Isaac old scarves, in the heat of summer and the cool Santa Anna winds that coat skin in thick tunnel winds breezes. Those memories and feelings, shaping and shifting in the concourse of what they inevitably forgot, they give way to the deep satisfied
In their little apartment, rented out with minimum wage and the income of a student, they kept satisfied on the sweet looming scent of obscurity. In the undisturbed walls of a place devoid of homely dangers, applied liked dream catching webs that could catch what intrudes in on them at night and all hours of the day. They made a safe haven out of a home, mountain ash and rowan wood built in the borders, white candles in the window, salt pounded in to the carpet. The coddling sentiment of belonging to a home built up in Isaac's chest like a cleansing flare, warming each appendage and anciently cold joint. It's the way he knew he was supposed to feel, this was normal, being loved and cared for was normal.
Everything felt affectionate and warm with Scott, breakfasts and unnecessary holidays. Isaac was welcomed into the McCall house upon every visit, the remnants of their friends and pack didn't leave their obligation of rapport. Scott's influence on him, a constant effigy of his ideals and longing; it was like the piping scent of vanilla, sweet and daring. He became a school boy again, pining after the person who caught his attention. But now it was like the returning of a favor, expressing the love that pinned him like a tack and glued his fingers together so that it's all that he could continue instead of pursuing another.
He drunkenly followed his these whims of adoration, flocking to the words of other that could convey whatever it was the he was feeling in the corners of his ribs that ached with the heat of longing. Verses of scholars and biblical passages, speaking like the voice of a poet where his own did fail him.
In Scott's doorway, night after night, lingering on with offers of kisses, offers of touching, offers of the potent boundless potential to him, Isaac repetitively declared.